


Ready or Not

by recrudescence



Category: Firefly
Genre: F/M, Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-15
Updated: 2009-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 20:57:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recrudescence/pseuds/recrudescence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mal isn't sure what he's gotten himself into. Co-starring manicures, carnivals, and Gnostic nuns.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ready or Not

**Author's Note:**

> Contains consensual underage sex and consensual CSI.
> 
> Takes place shortly after Objects in Space. Written for the Fall Fandom Free-For-All.

Breakfast is at lunchtime. Everything had run late after Early.

Late after Early. The words drip through Mal’s mind like one of River’s flippant, fortune-cookie utterances.

He goes wandering by the infirmary, but no one’s there. The preacher and doctor both got patched up and sent to lie down hours ago, and someone’s buffed the tables to a high shine as if no one’s set foot in the room at all. River’s slipped off again, disappearing as seamlessly as any other smuggled goods, like she hadn’t been out there earlier playing jacks with Kaylee as her brother was having a bullet extracted from his leg. Not that he’s shown himself since then either.

The scent from the kitchen drifts down the hall—Kaylee and Inara are cooking together, an assorted mash of food fit for all three meals of the day together. Kaylee said she reckoned people could use something in their stomachs about now.

Back towards breakfast, passing the passenger dorms and stopping long enough to tap on both the Tams’. Sliding open the door when he catches a hint of River's voice, but he guesses they hadn't heard him knock. Hadn’t meant anything by it, just planned to let them know that food was nearly ready and they'd do well to eat after the night's adventures.

Just a few inches before he’s gripping the door too hard to move it at all, and then Mal’s guts are going all twisted and tattered like a broken umbrella: torn inside out in a storm, nothing but broken spokes and rainwater everywhere.

Bared to his underwear, slim thighs bracketing his head, delicate ankles locked between his shoulder blades, and _that_ was why the doc hadn’t heard him. River, openmouthed and shimmying, letting out little starts of sounds that never quite come to a head. Mar of the wound on that left thigh, Simon’s knees under him and River’s nightdress a sullen pool of pink on the floor. Hair waving down to partially obscure her breasts. Too intimate, too unexpected, to the point that Mal had to look away, only that meant he was meeting River's gaze when he looked back up.

Her slitted eyes on his, fluttering and shuttering and not showing the faintest spark of surprise. Something not quite right about her, just like he'd said.

Livvie Gloucester. First time he ever did that with a girl. First thing that comes to mind as he’s looking with a slack jaw through the barely cracked door, watching River slide down onto the floor and gather her brother in close, fingers winding in his hair, his head drawn down onto the shoulder of hers farther from Mal. Closest he’s ever seen the doctor come to losing it, all from almost losing her, and is Simon even making a _sound_?

He’s gripping her hip and Mal can see the glistening sheen on his fingers even though he can't see his face. _Yesu_.

War veteran, underworld adept, proud owner of a ship and a mighty colorful past to go with a colorful array of battle scars, and _this_ is what really throws him off his axle. Something he might laugh about, if it were a story someone else were telling instead of one he’s actually watching unfold.

A soft pale hand stroking soft dark hair, an angry red wound on Simon's skin where the stitches are still holding it fast. Clutched and fitted together, the two of them like dual sides of another injury trying to mend itself on its own, bedcovers tumbled halfway to the floor. Simon petting his sister's head and holding her close just like always, only this time the kisses aren't just confined to her forehead and neither of them are wearing a stitch, now that she’s worked off his last article of clothing. _Too close_.

So it looks to Mal, anyway. Can’t judge what he can’t understand, not sure he wants to understand it. Like it’s something too private or too complicated to bother digging into. He closes the door as quietly as he can and flees. Discreetly.

Out of his depth, and it's like he's fifteen all over again, suntanned and fiery-eyed at that dusty carnival on Shadow, trying to outshoot men three times his age for a cash prize. His first shot went wild, didn’t even graze the target, and he’d been annoyed beyond belief since he had known how to shoot for years, known he should have been able to hold together.

“Put your piece away, son,” the lawman had said, stepping down from the judges' pedestal. Foreshadowing if ever he’d heard it.

He doesn’t get called son so much these days—has called the doctor the same, however—but sometimes the word still conjures up shrill calliope music and straw stuck to his shoes’ soles. Fifteen-year-old Malcolm drawing a gun like it’s the first time and fretting because it isn’t.

Wielding authority is nothing new to him, but faced with this thing the kids have going on between them makes him feel like he’s scrounging around in the dark for a candle that guttered out long ago. All those years ago, Sister Basilie from the chapel had commiserated—she’d been able to hit a target at four hundred yards before she took her vows. “There’s more to focus on than just your aim,” as she’d put it.

Mal didn’t have much stock in the Gnostics even before he threw in the towel on organized religion as a whole, but they kept to themselves and weren’t concerned with proselytizing. All the oldest sisters were called Sophia. “Means wisdom,” Sister Basilie had told him, a watered-down version of some older-than-planets doctrine. “She fell from the pleroma and the rest of the world was never the same.” Almost everyone in the verse, just middlemen trying to find their way back to some kind of knowledge too far beyond their understanding, that was the gist of it. In the grand scheme of things, it actually had made him feel a little less petulant about blowing his chances for that prize.

Basilie, before she got religion once her partner died, had once won fifty platinum in a jalapeno-eating contest against some local militiamen. Strange, the turnabouts some people underwent.

All he can think on now, how he’d give just about anything to be sitting on a bale of hay next to a nun with nothing weighing harder on his mind than a pristine paper target. As both an only child and a rather self-isolating individual he’s not rightly sure what it’s like to be that close to anyone, almost the same person, so intertwined that mingling in the flesh might not really matter when compared to the mind and the soul. Disregarding the fact that he doesn’t believe in the soul anymore and has no idea whether either of the Tams do—a doctor and a nutcase, they might very well not. Just in warm touches and cold bones and mortality as easily snapped as a stray thread.

Simon comes to breakfast late, all buttoned up and neat, River following with her hair uncombed and her face unreadable. The doctor’s mouth on his chopsticks and all Mal can think of is where _else_ it’s been and he can’t choke down another bite. The primmest of them all, also the dirtiest.

When he was a religious man, really not so very long ago, finding out about something like this would have made Mal gape and quake and rain down hellfire upon them. Maybe on some backwards border moon, it would have been forgivable. Born of ignorance or necessity or desperation. They’ve never interacted in front of him in any manner that's less than appropriate—a little more touchy-feely than most siblings, with the petting and hugging and hair-stroking, but that’s a given considering River’s state and Simon’s overprotective tendencies.

Now, he’s not sure he’s in any place to be passing judgment, and it’s clear that whatever's going on with their troublesome set of fugitives, it's by some kind of mutual approval. Unless maybe the doctor’s manipulating his sister or she’s manipulating him or it’s some new experimental treatment or it's been going on before the Academy ever entered the picture or maybe it’s some rich-folk Core thing he's never heard of, carrying on the family line on both sides…he doesn’t even know, and it’s making his head hurt like Jubal Early’s managed to reappear just to clock him another one.

“Manicures and hand massages,” River says at the table as when Zoe makes some comment about surgery being tougher than she gave it credit for. “He has to keep up appearances, keep his living.” A very serious expression. "They're _insured_."

Jayne snorts, Wash blinks, and Simon makes some comment Mal doesn’t quite hear about manicures being the last thing on anyone’s agenda. Last thing on _his_, that’s for damn sure; Mal can tell he's staring and hopes to hell it looks like lack of sleep instead of something else. River getting a napkin passed to her, flash of Simon’s pale wrist where it sneaks out of his shirt cuff, Mal thinking of nothing but those smooth, dexterous hands--that probably really _are_ insured--moving over her and into her, Simon handling his sister as skillfully as a scalpel. Simon, who smiles across the table at Kaylee as River impishly plucks a roasted potato from a serving bowl.

At least it wasn't Kaylee who went by to announce the food was almost ready. Small favors. Praise be for them.

River's eyes on him again, wide and knowing, and she passes the breadbasket without a word.

The same off-center girl who’s slashed Jayne’s chest with a butcher knife as calmly as opening a letter. The same sweetly bright face as when she asked for permission to come aboard, and he had given it. Beaming star-white and innocent from inside the helmet of a spacesuit. Too smart and too old for her own good.

Chopsticks slack in his hand, Mal wondering just what, exactly, he’s let back onto his ship.

Still seeing her, slipping down to Simon on the floor of his room. Still hearing her, though he’d tried not to.

“I wasn’t really going to leave,” she was saying softly, kneeling there with her arms wrapped around her brother and her gaze dismissing Mal as easily as if he were part of the wall. Like nothing else could even come close to mattering. “I thought you knew that.”

River, wisdom, tumbling out of her box and into their world and nothing the same forever after.


End file.
